


All these weddings, all these years

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Marriage, Post-Canon, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24577576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: Fourteen years later, there's another wedding.
Relationships: Matthew & Charles, Matthew/Matthew's End Credit Boyfriend (Four Weddings and a Funeral)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	All these weddings, all these years

Charles, by some miracle, was half an hour early. Matthew suspected some scheme cooked up by Mia, or Carrie, or both of them, but he didn’t ask. He was too glad to see him. Charles looked unfairly good in a Moss Bros hire suit; but then he always had.

‘Matthew.’

‘Charles.’

They shook hands, hugged, sat down on two of the gilt chairs in the front row. They’d been here before, years ago (a lifetime ago, if it was Mia’s life you were talking about, and why shouldn’t it be?). Not _here_ – you couldn’t get married in a stately home the last time Charles had tried it – and, of course, with roles reversed. Matthew couldn’t have got married at all, last time.

Charles didn’t seem to be thinking of any of that: he was too concerned with demonstrating that he had the ring. Only one ring: Daniel’s groomsman Joey had the other one. Matthew assumed he did, anyway.

Tucking the ring securely back into his waistcoat pocket, Charles turned to the other part of his duties. ‘How are you, you know, feeling?’

‘Well...’ He let the word die away.

‘Nerves?’

‘No. I was...’ Charles would understand, surely. ‘I was thinking about Gareth.’

Sudden sympathy. ‘Feels like a bit of a betrayal, does it?’

‘No, it’s not that.’ Gareth would have understood, more than anyone, about moving through grief to love again, about seizing the moment. _Dyeing the carp_ , Gareth might have said. It wasn’t that. ‘It’s the whole marriage thing.’

‘Ah,’ Charles said, with his old trick of simultaneously understanding and evading the point.

They couldn’t have done this. They _wouldn’t_ have done this. Gareth had never believed in marriage, had treated it as a farce put on by the straights for his own personal entertainment. And, Matthew thought, he’d had a point. All those Saturdays they’d spent – he carefully didn’t think, wasted – in churches, in registry offices, watching their friends lie to each other and to the authorities about how they intended to treat each other for the rest of their lives. Angus and Laura and that horrendous custody battle over the twins; Tom and Deirdre, constantly having to be explained to each other; Carrie and her awful Tory; Henrietta decking Charles, though before they’d made any promises they couldn’t keep, thank goodness...

So what was Matthew doing togged up in bow-tie and kilt, waiting to go through the whole charade himself?

‘Maybe you’d call it sour grapes,’ Matthew said. ‘But it would also have been a point of principle for him. If he were here today, if he could have done it – he wouldn’t have done it. Even if I’d asked him.’

Charles nodded. ‘You never told me,’ he said. ‘Did you ask Daniel? Or did he ask you?’

‘I asked him,’ Matthew said. He caught himself thinking that Daniel had seemed to expect it; but asking had been an impulse, both prompted and followed by a wave of intense happiness. He hadn’t regretted it for a moment, until now. He wasn’t regretting it now.

‘Ah,’ Charles said, again.

They sat there in silence, while the scent of lilies grew ever more oppressive.

‘You know what I think, Matthew?’

‘No.’

‘I think, it doesn’t matter.’

It was not at all what Matthew had expected him to say. ‘Really?’

‘It makes no difference. If you’re going to fall apart, you’re going to fall apart, and if you got married first, well, at least you got a party out of it.’

He said, dryly, ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

‘ _If_ you’re going to fall apart. But I don’t think you are, you and Daniel.’

Matthew didn’t think so, either, but it felt dangerous to lean too hard on that idea, to envisage year upon year stretching out in front of them. He’d made that mistake before. Or, rather, he’d let the strange, wonderful, time, that had been the early days with Gareth stretch out, strangely, wonderfully, into years, had let himself assume that it would go on doing that, until – until it hadn’t. He didn’t think like that any more. Every new day with Daniel was a privilege; he dreaded the day when he forgot that; feared that this day, in particular, might bring it closer.

He tried to express something of this. ‘It feels like tempting fate, a bit.’

Charles said, simply, ‘ _We_ like him.’

It was true. Daniel had slotted into their awkward little group as if made to fit: he amused Fiona, charmed Scarlett, respected David, tolerated Tom, laughed at Charles. Moved courteously, but not obsequiously, around Gareth’s memory.

Matthew asked, ‘If Carrie wanted to marry you...?’

Charles laughed. ‘She doesn’t. Mia gets ideas about it sometimes. We’ve always put up a united front.’

Matthew thought about his sharp, bright-eyed, god-daughter with a surge of affection. He remembered her tottering down the aisle after Serena a decade ago; wondered what alarming get-up she would appear in today. ‘You wouldn’t want to, then?’

‘If it ain’t broke...’ Charles shrugged his shoulders. ‘You know us, Matthew: if we feel like having a party, we have a party. Not being married works for us. Me and Carrie. At this point, it's become our thing, but it doesn't have to be everyone's thing. I can’t see any reason why being married wouldn’t work for you and Daniel.’

Nor could Matthew. ‘It’s the right thing,’ he said. ‘It would have been the wrong thing for me and Gareth, but it’s the right thing for me and Daniel.’ It seemed the more true for having been articulated. Now it felt too obvious to point out that the insubstantial but all-important thing that they called a _relationship_ was different, that the thing he’d had with Gareth was not the thing that he had now with Daniel, that both had been rare and wonderful in their own ways, and that each had called for a different response.

‘Well, then,’ said Charles. A door opened and closed again somewhere behind them; they both looked up, but nobody came in, and he continued, ‘It was what I needed. What we needed, me and Carrie. What you and Gareth had, when I actually managed to notice it, that showed me that we didn’t have to have all the fandango. And in fact we’ve done a lot better without it. But I’ve never thought that other people shouldn’t have the fandango if they wanted it.’

‘Well,’ Matthew said, ironically, ‘thank you for that.’

Charles grinned, rather smugly. ‘You’re welcome.’

The door opened again, and stayed open this time. The first guests found their way in. Matthew knew them only by sight: they were cousins of Daniel’s, too busy greeting each other to notice him.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s stop cluttering the place up.’

‘You go,’ said Charles. ‘I’ll stay here and concentrate on not losing the ring.’

Matthew laughed, and left him there. Somewhere, perhaps in the lobby, probably in the garden, there was Daniel. They would find each other, and walk, arm in arm, into something new, something familiar, something that they would create, day by day, for as long as they had together.


End file.
